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I work at Google, but this is my personal website. The views expressed on this site are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. Comments left on this blog are only representative of those who left them.

Christmastime – Big and tall

The technical quality of this picture isn’t great (it’s from my phone), but it’s a great picture.

We Three Kings/Carol Of The Bells

The song I chose for my first Christmas post was “Carol of the Bells.” The second post was about a film score incorporating the song. The song for this post is Kenny G’s “We Three Kings/Carol Of The Bells,” which, as you may have already guessed from the title, combines “We Three Kings” and “Carol of the Bells” into a single song.

In one of Letterman’s monologues he told the following story, which I’ll have to paraphrase since this was years ago and I’m doing it from memory:

So I was in the elevator, listening to Kenny G.

[Dave looks up at the ceiling, implying elevator music.]

I gave him a dollar.

Big and tall

When your family room isn’t limited to a single story, you can’t help but try and take advantage of that extra height. My family has certainly utilized that extra space with our Christmas trees. While they’ve settled down to a more reasonable height in recent years (not exceeding 12 feet), in the past we had some real whoppers. Sometimes, we’d even visit multiple tree farms because they didn’t all have trees that were tall enough every year. We eventually found a consistently satisfactory place, and knew the drill well. We would drive past the parking lot, and take our SUV back to one of the farther fields where they kept the big trees. There, we often had the whole place to ourselves to find and cut a tree, and then load it on the roof of the truck. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a bailer out there; we had learned that our trees were too big to fit through it anyway. Finding and loading the tree was one part of the process. The next step was getting it in the house.

In our previous house, there was a standard-sized door right next to where we placed the tree. We didn’t get to use that door. No, we had to take it in through the double doors in the front of the house. Remember, it was too big to be wrapped up, so the branches were fully extended. One year, the tree was so large that even after opening up the double doors and trying to make it back to the family room, we had to take it out and cut it from the bottom so it could make a turn that a car could probably handle. After the season was over, the tree was taken out in pieces.

The trees greatly exceeded the published limits of a standard Christmas tree stand, and my dad modified stand to meet our special needs. His creation is an all-metal tree stand which is bolted to a wide wooden platform. Our trees to this day are also secured to the wall via hooks and wire, which prevent the tree from falling into the room should it become unstable. We didn’t always do this.